The Crazies' Franken-Virus Toxins: How Scared Should We Be?

How much is the portrayal of the disease—and the military response—Hollywood hyperbole in The Crazies? Popular Mechanics spoke to experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to find out.

Something's in the water in Ogden Marsh, Iowa--and it's turning the town's residents into bad neighbors. In The Crazies, a genetically engineered weapon (manufactured by the military, naturally, but on the way to being destroyed) leaks into Ogden Marsh's water supply, making the town's residents ill and incredibly violent. When confronted with the infected, the only thing to do is run: All rationality has been eclipsed by aggression. And just when the townsfolk think it can't get any worse, the military quarantines Ogden Marsh, leaving the uninfected to die at the hands of their neighbors.

When creating the illness, director Breck Eisner wanted something based in reality, so he consulted with experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The carriers experience five stages of infection. "The 'One' was being uninfected and the 'Five' was an Ebola-like bleedout, full-collapse death," Eisner says. The stages in between allow for other emotional and physical transitions. "We looked at all the muscles tightening up and becoming taut in the neck and face areas," the director says. "We played around with increased blood flow and heart rate and the idea that the veins would start to bulge out and become pronounced." From the time of infection, the unlucky inhabitants have about three days until they die.

In addition to Ebola, Eisner and special-effects team Almost Human based the appearance of the disease around tetanus, rabies, and Stevens-Johnson Syndrome. "We picked the best of the worst symptoms of the diseases," Eisner says.

(The movie never clearly specifies how the disease spreads, and wrings some dramatic tension from that ambiguity, so prospective viewers beware of spoilers below.) Eisner spoke with the CDC's Steve Monroe to figure out the possibility of manufacturing a virus in a toxin that switches from a waterborne illness to an airborne disease as it mutates. "The filmmakers clearly realized that they were going to stretch reality, but wanted to know about what was possible," Monroe says. "In general, toxins are fairly stable. There are relatively few viral-produced toxins. Certainly in theory one could engineer a virus that would be stable in the environment and transmitted by ingestion and spread by the respiratory route, but to engineer something that could change in a matter of days is very unlikely."

However, Monroe says that the threat of something being introduced into a water supply--including viruses--is a real possibility. After all, common but nasty diarrhea viruses like Rotavirus exist in lakes and pools. "People on the anti-terrorism side are concerned about what could be introduced into the water supply, realizing that it would have to be something to make it through purification," he says. "In terms of viruses, they vary quite a bit in their stability in the environment. Hepatitis A, for instance, is quite stable in the environment. If introduced into water, it would persist for a long time. Other viruses like HIV are not strong at all and don't persist."

However, there are instances where viruses have switched modes of infection. Monroe recalls a cluster of peculiar severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) cases that echoes the plague in The Crazies. "There was an apartment complex where it was never convincingly shown what caused the spread, but it almost certainly involved the sewage system over direct respiratory spread," he says. "But the notion that a pathogen would change its makeup overnight is far-fetched."

In addition to the virus, Eisner consulted the CDC on isolation and quarantine methods used within the film. "There were two elements that we talked about: the workers and how they would be handled, and the containment zones," Eisner says. "We took artistic license with the way the actual containment was set up, but the main concept of a central staging zone where they would triage the sick and get the healthy to a secondary location was the basic tenet for the setup."

Hollywood often gets quarantine wrong, according to Martin Cetron, the director of global migration and quarantine at the CDC. "Having seen other Hollywood attempts at similar themes, they are usually way out there and completely disconnected from reality," he told Popular Mechanics via an e-mail from Haiti. In the film Outbreak, for example, the military locks in residents of an affected area and has shoot-to-kill orders if anyone tries to escape. This violent streak also exists in The Crazies--and serves as a basis for the government-paranoia theme of the script. Then again, if the plague is airborne, viewers could root for the soldiers to kill each and every character trying to escape quarantine. Eisner stands by his decision to have the military contain and isolate the incident in a hostile manner. "They are fighting this weapon they created," he says. "That's why such aggressive and harsh tactics are used in the film. I decided to limit the point of view to the townsfolk of the movie. They wouldn't know why they are rounded up. It made the experience more realistic."

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